09.07.19 - Takamasa Momose "Making and trapping cold free radicals below 100 mK"

The research on cold and ultracold molecules has expanded rapidly over the past decade because of their importance in various fields from fundamental physics to interstellar chemistry. Our group at UBC has been developing techniques for trapping ultracold free radicals using magnetic molecular decelerators for several years, and recently we successfully demonstrated trapping of cold (<100 mK) methyl radical (CH3), the most fundamental hydrocarbon free radical, for over 1 s. One of the motivations to engage in cold polyatomic free radicals is based on our recent prediction that the parity violation effect due to the electroweak interaction may be significantly enhanced in polyatomic free radicals, which could be the origin of homochirality of biological molecules. In addition, the demonstrated trapping capability of polyatomic radicals opens up various possibilities for realizing ultracold ensembles of molecules towards Bose-Einstein condensation, investigations of reactions governed by quantum statistics, and applications to quantum information processes. In the talk, I will discuss motivations of our cold molecule studies together with our recent progresses.